7. Performance - Competitive comparison

Since caching effects vary among OSes and products, we compare competitive performance using a 128 MByte file size, which tends to eliminate any caching effects.

Figure 12: 128 MB Read performance comparison
(click image to enlarge)

The plots in Figures 12 and 13 show read and write speeds respectively for a fixed file size of 128 MBytes and record sizes from 64 to 16384 kBytes. The plots contain not only the mini's NAS mode results, but also those from previous tests of the Linksys NSLU2, Buffalo Technology Kuro Box, Synology Diskstation, Maxtor Simple Share, Tritton Simple NAS, Hawking Net-Stor, and Iomega StorCenter Pro.

As you can see, the mini ranks second to last among the products compared, besting only the Hawking Net-Stor BYOD NAS [reviewed here]. I suspect this could be due to the FAT32 filesystem used.

Figure 13: 128 MB Write performance comparison
(click image to enlarge)